Volume 3 | Issue 2 | Summer 2006

For the first time in its history Vertigo has produced an issue that that has not been put onto paper, but has been produced as an electronic edition, on CD and online. This will be the first of the new quarterly Vertigo's annual electronic issues, which will go on sale every summer. The key additional feature in using this new format is that we can actually show some of the moving image work that we are engaging with. We also don't have space constraints on how long each article is – they are simply at the length at which we think they work best.

Content

Riding the wave of documentary’s current popularity, the Channel 4 British Documentary Film Foundation has launched Britdoc, a new annual festival – based in the UK for filmmakers from around the world.

Chris Welsby’s films are among the most rigorous works by a collection of practitioners who emerged with a flurry of landscape filmmaking around the British structuralist film scene of the early seventies, and this new British Film Institute DVD release provides a good introductory survey of the range of his activities.

Ben Rivers has been experimenting with film since he studied at Falmouth School of Art in the late 90s. He has made over nine short works which have been shown at festivals, galleries and fancy boutiques around the world.

Women’s acting careers seem to suffer from what one writer calls double jeopardy. Not only do actresses receive fewer roles and have less star presence than actors, but this difference increases with age.

In 1961, Polish director Andrzej Munk died in a car crash halfway through filming what would become his last work, The Passenger. After his death, the film was finished by his friends and crew members.

Walk into Tate Britain and go into the video space on the ground floor. It is completely dark. So dark it takes a good ten minutes for my eyes to adjust and locate the seating in the centre of the space.

Increasingly, unprecedented accessibility to moving image technology such as DV cameras and simple computer editing programs, and even mobile phones, coupled with an unsurpassed sophistication in the understanding of images and visual culture, has fuelled our willingness to engage with and employ these...

This animation is a parody of the well-known Nintendo console game “Super Mario Brothers”. The main character, Mario is replaced by Kagao, who is very weak, vulnerable and easily killed in the game. However, Kagao is prepared to stand at the start-line again, ready to fight.

The children’s media sector is up in arms about the impending ban on TV advertising of unhealthy foods to children. ITV claim that this will cut their revenue by 18% and will consequently reduce or perhaps end all their UK-based production for children.

Forty-two years on from the joyous headlong rush through the Louvre of his three protagonists in Bande à Part(1964), Jean-Luc Godard asks for a much greater attention span from visitors to his own exhibition, entitled Voyage(s) en Utopie, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris...

Matthias Müller is a filmmaker and an artist. He is a movie spectator, an analyst, a choreographer of memory and feelings. He discovers hidden spaces and times and rearranges the familiar: Hollywood and queer cinema, experimental film and the fine arts, history and imagination, words and images...

“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach out for my Browning!” – this quotation from Hans Johst’s Nazi-play Schlageter, performed on Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 1933, has been variously associated with both Hitler’s Fieldmarshall Herrmann Göring, and the aesthetics and politics of Dadaism...

Having won a Cannes Grand Jury Prize and the Grand Prix at the European Short Festival with The Sheep Thief, his graduation film from the Royal College of Art, anticipation was high for The Warrior (2001), London-born Asif Kapadia’s feature debut.

On the Southbank in the rain a group of people carrying flags assembles. Someone is filming them. Why? They gather in front of a tormented bronze figure dwarfed by the London Eye. It is a memorial to the International Brigades, those who volunteered to fight in Spain in 1936.

At the Cambridge Film Festival this year there was an event to debate the current censorship guidelines. Students from local schools came to take part, from a broad age range of 11 to 17. John Dyer from the British Board of Film Censorship explained the key issues...

James Cameron, the US director both revered and reviled for such special-effects heavy blockbuster epics as Titanic and the Terminator films, recently argued that for cinema to survive in an era when films can be downloaded onto a television, a laptop or a mobile phone it would need to offer something uniquely ‘cinematic.’

REFRAME is DVD playing computer software that allows film and video to be combined with unofficial critical commentary. The software employs Shockwave (an Adobe file format for web-based multimedia) and has emerged from research collaboration between Tony Cryer, Nick Haeffner, Chris Lane...

The long overdue collaboration between Paris and London's two most intellectually ambitious film magazines, Vertigo and Cahiers du Cinéma, finally came together with a series of talks, paired screenings, Q&As and UK premieres in June 2006.